marnee was gone. the fact was as certain as a rock plunging to the ocean floor, it had trajectory and one enslaved to gravity from the murky depth, when it hit the bottom it made a dull thud that no one heard, i accepted the loss.

things change, that's the consistent truth you can rely upon, the buddhist monk inside of me liked the poetry in this and eventually letting go of her became a mental process not an emotional one, and thus i found myself making enquiry's about work. 
i asked a few old colleagues about available positions, they promised me to get back to me as soon as something was available but the phone didn't ring for weeks, eventually months, and i spent my days smoking emma's grass and watching the rain that had settled in. i also began painting.

these were large action expressionist explosions of colour and words, i was obsessed with the idea of mixing writing with painting, and in some canvases i had written descriptions of objects rather than painted them, or i had written words in a narrative upon a background of paint, sometimes short slogans, single words or statements. eventually i began to feel the need to paint overwhelm me, no longer an enthusiastic energy but an obsessional one, something needed to be expressed and i could feel it coming as i attacked canvass with brushes and sometimes fingers and hands. hours would pass, time dissolved and as the light faded and emma began to start the fire i would find myself staring at my creation wondering how it got there and what it was. i had something inside me that i was attempting to capture or exorcise but i was always left dissatisfied until one day i found myself finishing something when emma walked in escorted by a hells angel. he was not exactly an angel but he wore bikers gear and his body was covered in tattoos and he looked like trouble to me.
he walked right up to the paining and stood there staring at it, 'this is fucking great man, you captured it here. this is amazing, i recognised it the moment i saw it.'
'who the fuck is this emma?'
'chill mission, scott this is captain mission, mission this is scott.'
'captain mission, cool, i like this paining man, it's captured it totally, you really did man, it's the fear, dune, frank herbert.'
suddenly i respected him, for anyone that was reasonably well read i could identify with, we stood there passing a joint and looking at this strange dark mass of energy with the words, 'i must not fear, fear is the mind-killer. fear is the little-death that brings obliteration. i will face my fear. i will permit it to pass over me and through me. when it has gone past i will turn the inner eye to see its path. where the fear has gone, there will be nothing, only i will remain.'
'oh yeah,' emma said, 'i can see it now.'
i had taken the quote from the book 'dune' and painted around it, almost obscuring the words,with dark swirls of black, deep cobalt blue and reds, apart from the words the whole thing had been an unconscious act and i was not really sure what i was doing but now looking at this painting i understood what scott was pointing out. the words were obscured behind the paint, they were barely legible and to be honest i'm not sure i understood why i painted them, they just lodged in my mind from years ago.
it didn't take long for us to become friends. scott told me about the fear, he was like a mentor and although i only knew him for about two months, in that short time he influenced me greatly. i had always been a loner, letting a handful of people in and very selective about who they were but scott got the gold pass. he was deceptively gentle but incredibly strong and over that period he trained me to become strong to. i never considered my own psychology before, i was just me, doing my thing, a different animal back then, quiet and somewhat passive, a surfer guy, keeping things simple, generally just living in the moment while people around me made plans and schemed about a nervous future. i never thought about attempting to face my fears, letting them dwell in my subconscious haunting me from their depths, i'd never really even considered this may be some kind of way to grow and mature, that it may be an initiation but scott told me many things about the nature of fear and how to deal with it, and step by step i went about quite methodically facing all my fears and one by one i conquered them. fear off people, fear of being in crowds, being alone, fear of failure, fear of success, fear of pain, fear of change, heights, moths, snakes, girls,social situations, being myself, the list is endless but scott gave me various challenges, and one by one i found myself doing things i had never considered before, jumping off cliffs into the ocean, fire twirling, going into crowded bars and talking to the most beautiful women in the room without feeling embarrassed or self conscious, talking to men in suits, challenging authority, scott showed me balance and equilibrium, he would teach me how to use the less dominant hand, how to balance, he gave me a sense of place in the world, i found my position in time and space, a new way of movement but mostly it was all about fear. everything was one fear really, an amorphous mass of fear that kept me somewhat frozen in a state of anxiety i had never really acknowledged because this is normal. 
now i am not saying i conquered all my fears during this period but i changed myself at a fundamental level. fear was now my friend, even death was something my attitude had shifted, my own ego was changing, i was adopting a somewhat spiritual focus without being trapped in dogma. eventually my physiology itself healed and as an outwards manifestation i found my body healing and my bones felt new and vital, i was agile, athletic, my mind was sharp and i was beginning to tap into an inner wisdom i never even knew i possessed but the real difference was in my spirit. 
i liked this path i was on, a self directed evolution. it felt positive and worthwhile, i liked pushing my boundaries, i wanted to test my limits and with scott's guidance i did. i trusted him completely, with my life, and one night i did a small ritual to establish my relationship with my newly discovered universe. i wrote down my desire to challenge all fear and burnt it at midnight and as i watched the sigil burning, i could feel some strange shifts occur, a door closing and one opening.

i was not yet middle aged but this period was like the rite of passage, it was the end of one stage into some new world, it was the transition of becoming a man, to me it was the first time my life really began to have purpose.
scott lived in a shack down on the beach with his biker friends, it was a wild environment, no doors no windows, the big tv had been gutted and filled with candles upon a big mound of melted wax and some circuitry, there was sculptures everywhere and loud music playing constantly, there were artists and musicians and fire dancers and freaks coming and going and they all accepted me perfectly as one of their own. in the evenings everyone would sit around playing guitars and bongos and even me a man with no rhythm would join in chanting or singing. the whole place had this native indian feel to it and scott introduced me to the cultures of these people, through their connection with a great spirit and the way of the warrior. although he subscribed to no religion or fundamental belief system he practiced being true to himself, but he always emphasised that one had to know oneself before you could do that. perhaps we were just egocentric fools, deluding ourselves, looking for something that was not there, filling our lives with something that was as illusionary as everything else but to me for those short months it felt very real. 
like all things in my life it ended suddenly, one day i wandered down to the beach shack and everyone had left, the house itself had been emptied and there was not a trace of anyone ever staying there, the rooms had been cleaned and cleared. later i asked emma where scott had gone, she smiled at me but never answered.